even in jest. He inclines his head in amused apology. A firebrand, he says. I see I must mend my ways. See that you do, she commands, and nestles comfortably under his arm. His gray beard brushes her brow. G OSSIP burns ahead of her. She is rich, as rich as the old, obese Nizam of --- who was , weighed in jewels on his birthdays and so was able to increase taxes simply by putting on weight. His subjects would quake as they saw his banquets, his mighty halvas, his tow- ering jellies, his ku!ft Hi- malayas, for they knew that the endless avalanche of delicacies sliding down the Nizam's gullet meant that the food on their own tables would be sparse and plain, as he wept with ex- hausted repletion so their children would weep with hunger, his gluttonywolÙd be their famine. Yes, fil- thy rich, the gossip siz- zles, her American father claims descent from the deposed royal family of an Eastern European state, and each year he flies the élite employees of his commercial empire by private aircraft to his lost kingdom, where by the banks of the River of Time itself he stages a four-day golf tournament, and then, laughing, contemptuous, godlike, fires the champion, destroys his life for the hubris of aspiring to glory, abandons him (/) by the shores of Time's River, into whose 2 tumultuous, deadly waters the champion finally dives, and is lost, like hope, like a ball. a.... She is rich; she is a fertile land; she will bring sons, and rain. No, she is poor, the gossip flashes, her father hanged himself when she was 6 born, her mother was a whore, she also is a creature of wildernesses and rocky ground, the drought is in her body, like a curse, she is barren, and has come in the I- hope of stealing brown babies from their homes and nursing them from bottles, since her own breasts are d Mr. Maharaj has searched the world for its treasures and brought back a magic jewel whose light will change their lives Mr. Maharaj has fallen into iniquity and brought Despair into his palace, has suc- cumbed to yellow-haired doom. So she is becoming a story the people tell, and argue over. TravellIng toward the palace, she, too, is aware of entering a story, a group of stories about women such as herself, fair and yellow, and the dark men they loved. She was warned by friends at home, in her tall city Do not go with him, they cautioned her. If you sleep with him, he will not respect you. He does not think of women like you as wives . Your otherness excites him, your freedom. He will break your heart. Though he calls her his bride, she is not his wife. So far, she feels no fear. A ruined gateway stands in the wil- derness, an entrance to nowhere. A sin- gle tree, the last of all the local trees to fall, lies rotting beside it, the exposed roots grabbing at air like a dead giant's hand. A wedding party passes, and the limousine slows. She sees that the tur- baned groom, on his way to meet his wife, is not young and eager, but WISP- 123 haired, old and parched; she imagines a tale of undying love, long denied by cir- cumstance, overcoming adversity at last. Somewhere an elderly sweetheart awaits her wizened amour They have loved each other always, she imagines, and now near their stories' conclusion they have found this happy ending. By accident she speaks these words aloud. Mr. Ma- haraj smiles and shakes his head. The bridegroom's bride is young, a virgin from a distant village. Why would a pretty young girl wish to marry an old fool? Mr. Maharaj shrugs. The old fellow will have settled for a small dowry, he replies, and if one has many daughters such fac- tors have much weight. As for the oldster, he adds, in a long life there may be more than a single dowry. These thIngs add up. Flutes and horns blow raucous music in her di- rection. A drum crumps like cannon fire. T rans- sexual dancers heckle her through the window. Ohé, America, they screech, arré, howdy-podner, say what? O.K., you take care now,I'm-a-yankee-doodle- dandy! Ooh, baby, wah- wah, maximum cool, Miss America, shake that thing! She feels a sudden panic. Drive faster, she cries, and the driver accelerates. Dust explodes around the wedding party, hiding it from view. Mr. Maharaj is solicitude personified, bu t she is angry with herself. Excuse me, she mutters. It's nothing. The heat. ("^MERICA." Once upon a time in .L\.. "America," they had shared an Indian lunch three hundred feet above street level, at a table with a view of the vernal lushness of the park, feasting their eyes upon an opulence of vegetation that now, as she remembers it in this desic- cated landscape, feels obscene. My coun- try is just like yours, he'd said, flirting. Big, turbulent, and full of gods. We speak our kind of bad English and you speak yours. And before you became Romans, when you were just colonials, our masters